A gastro outside the ghetto

The boys who work at my local and wonderful greengrocer's, Mechanicou Brothers, are friendly to the freelance shopper. I need my community to smile and wave so that home-working doesn't always feel like psychosis.

One of them, Lee, suggested I review Baobab, his new local. I rarely hear about places south of the river, and almost never hear about gastropubs outside the gentrified ghetto postcodes.

Drive in a straight line from Clapham Common through Balham and Tooting and you'll find Baobab sitting on a junction opposite one of those PC World/Mothercare/Currys-style out-of-town giant shop-and-car-park concepts.

Baobab has a short and tempting menu of sophisticated favourites: pork tenderloin wrapped in leek and pancetta with beans, plaice fillets and asparagus, roasted red pepper cannelloni.

I had a chilled pea-and-mint soup that had been made with meat stock (ham I'd guess from the saltiness), which knocked out the requisite pea-green summer intensity. There was a sort of greasiness to it too which, while OK, would have worked better hot.

My new friend, Technoboy, had some sardines, which were fine, but the flesh tended on the chewy side. The chef did time at John Torode's place in Smithfield.

I didn't taste much of Torode's obsession with provenance - the orange-and-fennel salad that came with the sardines was a nice idea, but suffered from ingredients with poor flavour. Technoboy thought I was harsh - he has never reviewed with me before and I could see him cringing. 'You're being rude.' I'm doing my job.

His salad nicoise was a first on me. Every element was laid out on the plate separately, from fat black olives to a soft-boiled egg. We wondered whether we liked this and decided after much Oxford University-style pretentious pondering, quite out of place in Colliers Wood, that we did.

The seared tuna merely kissed a hot pan, as it should. I had a chicken burger, which was fiercely hot with dry jerk spices and came with buttery corn on the cob and the finest frozen chips I've ever eaten, salty and fried to a perfect, August-in-St Tropez, crispy brown. The spices were the kind of hot you'd never get in a more central trendy pub.

Decorated in shades of brown and beige, all the furniture is distinctly outside the gastrotemplate, meaning it's new (apart from some funky African dictator-style leather sofas). The wine list is heavily New World and they sell a layered shot called a Baobab Bomb. There are posh lagers on tap, including Hoegaarden and San Miguel, and Tetley's.